School Leader

Kentucky pension reform: What compromises are teachers willing to make?

Kentucky policy leaders have released their proposed changes to the ailing pension system and the reaction from state educators has been swift and ferocious. Educators have claimed the reforms will “destroy public education” while Governor Matt Bevin has shrugged off fears about mass retirements as “nonsense” and called reform critics “chicken littles.”

Neither kind of rhetoric is helpful. Pension reform is going to be painful to state employees and will have consequences in early retirements and possibly in public perceptions of the attractiveness of the teaching profession. Policymakers need to accept that the proposal does not, in fact, “keep the promise” for active employees. It keeps some promises, but reneges on others. And perhaps those broken promises should never have been made or were based on completely unrealistic assumptions about the long-term strength of the pension system. Either way, educators – including me (with 17 years accumulated in the system) – are looking at a less rosy retirement picture than we expected. People are understandably going to be upset about that.

On the other hand, educators must accept that reforms have to be made (and we should have been demanding changes long, long ago to prevent the current crisis). The pension system is now broken and threatens the fiscal solvency of the state. Many teachers seem to think that asking taxpayers (most of whom are already struggling to scrape together their own retirement) to sacrifice more to keep the current system limping along is sufficient. The state will definitely have to pour more public money into the pension system to keep it afloat (as it did last year) and to cover the existing liabilities (now $14.5 billion for the Kentucky Teacher Retirement System alone), even with the proposed changes. Tax reform may help. But even with more funding, the existing system is not sustainable. By the Kentucky Education Association’s own estimates, even if the pension system had been properly funded for the last decade, our KTRS liability would still be over $10 billion.

So what compromises are educators willing to make? What alternatives to the proposed pension reforms, if any, can be accepted? In their fury and frustration over the proposed reforms (agitated by the Governor’s sometimes provocative rhetoric), I don’t hear educator groups articulating their priorities for reform. Let’s consider key components of the suggested pension changes. Which of these would my fellow educators be willing to accept? Which are completely unacceptable? Until the conversation reaches this level, I’m not sure every day Kentuckians or our lawmakers are going to pay much attention to our concerns, nor should they.

Freeze on Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs)

The proposed reforms have little impact on current retirees, which everyone seems to agree should be the top priority (policymakers early on rejected the idea of taking back previously-granted cost of living adjustments), and may account for the relatively measured response to the plan from the Kentucky Retired Teachers Association. However, the proposal calls for a five-year freeze on cost of living adjustments, which would also apply to future retirees during their first five years of retirement. This is probably the most legally uncertain element of the plan since teachers prepay their COLAs. I’m not an attorney, but it would seem to me that a court would view such changes in light of the total pension reform plan, which leaves retiree health insurance benefits – a costly component of the pension system – entirely intact. Cuts to the insurance program could have been far more costly to retirees in the long run that the COLA freeze. As reforms to the pension system go, this might be the least difficult to accept considering the alternatives.

Additional 3 Percent Contribution for Retiree Insurance

On the other hand, I’ve probably heard the most complaints from active employees about the plan to impose a three percent employee contribution to fund the retiree insurance program. It’s not clear to many teachers why this new contribution is needed, other than to further shift the burden for the program from the state to employees. For most employees this will amount to an immediate cut in pay, especially for university employees like me who haven’t had a meaningful salary increase in more than eight years. If this is all necessary, spreading the increase out over a three-year period would be less onerous, but obviously wouldn’t raise as much money for the system as fast. I think asking for some relief on this proposal might be a good priority for educators.

Sick days and the three year average

After five years, the proposal ends the practice of letting educators count credit for their accumulated sick days toward their last year’s salary for retirement purposes. Teachers can still get paid for 30% of their unused sick days (an incentive to stay at work and not use them), but the sick days won’t artificially inflate retirement benefits as they currently do.

Perhaps of greater long-term significance, after 2023 retirement benefits will also be based on the average of an employee’s highest five years of salary, rather than the current highest three years. This could mean significantly less lifetime retirement income for some employees, but will also help create more long-term stability and savings for the system.

There is no way to save the pension system without making some changes to the expected benefits for active employees, and I think these are reforms that we should accept. Retirement benefits should be based primarily on the income we actually received during employment. These perks were nice to have in the past, but given the current crisis seem reasonable to forgo.

Double dipping

Current KTRS rules place limits on how much retirees can work in certain roles in P-12 school settings without compromising their benefits, but the new plan stipulates that retirees may not work in any full-time “state employment” unless they suspend their retirement benefits temporarily while they work. This has potentially big implications for educators who might wish to retire and then work in university settings, charter schools, or other public roles. The lost opportunity to capitalize on the expertise of experienced educators would have to be weighed against the potential cost savings to the system of preventing this kind of “double-dipping,” but that should be a conversation we are having with lawmakers.

However, I also think it’s important for educators to realize how incongruous these kinds of provisions in our pension system are with the experience of non-public employees. Retirement benefits are supposed to provide for us when we are no longer working, not pad our incomes when we’re ready to start another career (as much as I might look forward to doing that myself someday; of course a second career in the private sector is still an option). Most Kentuckians don’t have these kinds of opportunities, and may not be sympathetic to our frustrations. Reforms like these should definitely be under consideration.

Shifting to a 401K system

Perhaps the biggest long-term proposal in these pension reforms is to shift new employees into a 401K-style system with a provision for districts and schools to match those contributions up to a certain limit. This exposes employees to market risks, to be sure, but is no less risky than relying on future politicians to keep the promises of past politicians (especially when those promises were based on rosy market assumptions that would make most financial planners blush), as our current situation clearly demonstrates. Many teachers might be better off today if they could have devoted the 12-plus percent of their paychecks that went into KTRS into individual retirement accounts. For this reason, I have always advised young teachers to supplement KTRS with separate retirement investments – not easy to do, but those who have made that sacrifice are probably very grateful at this point.

A 401K system is what most non-public employees use to save for retirement, but of course those employees also enjoy some additional protection from Social Security. Kentucky teachers do not pay into Social Security and are not allowed to draw those benefits. As a part of pension reform, Kentucky should consider this as an option for future educators, but it would not come without some potentially negative consequences, especially for active employees. For example, federal Social Security rules would consider a teacher a “new employee” each time a person switched districts or took time off to have children or pursue other career opportunities and tried to return to teaching, forcing them out of the old system and into a new one.

For these reasons I would have preferred to see some kind of hybrid plan that blended 401K contributions with a state pension, but such an approach might perpetuate some (or a lot) of the structural instability of the current system. Nevertheless, it should be a topic of discussion.

Let's measure our rhetoric and talk solutions

These are the kinds of conversations educators should be having with lawmakers and should be promoting in their public comments and on social media.

Yes, the system is going to need a bigger public investment of funds to make it work. We still do not have reliable forecasts of the potential costs savings, but these reforms are likely to just stop the bleeding. More revenues will be needed to cover the liability and put the system on a sound footing for the future. I am confident these will be big themes in upcoming discussions on tax reform and the state budget.

In the meantime, educators need to accept that structural changes in the system are necessary. We need to acknowledge what is good about the proposed reform plan. It largely leaves current retirees alone. It does not change the retirement age or years required for service for active employees. It preserves the basic benefit structure for active employees and allows us to continue to work beyond the minimum years of service if we choose to do so while contributing to a new system that will actually provide more financial security in the long run by diversifying our retirement investments.

But it does ask for some significant sacrifices, some which may incentivize premature retirements and add to our pension liabilities in the short run. Let’s be circumspect and thoughtful about which of those sacrifices we need to make to preserve the system and what alternatives we might propose that will minimize the risks to the profession and the students we serve.

Let’s show lawmakers and the public that we’re serious about fixing the system by measuring our rhetoric and bringing a real dialogue of compromise and idea sharing. Whatever potentially negative implications there may be to this conversation, pension reform is not going to destroy the teaching profession. I didn't choose this profession because of the pension, and I don't think most of my colleagues did either, as much as we hoped to enjoy that perk. The pension liability itself is a deterrent, among other things, to recruiting quality candidates into this business. Let's work with lawmakers to fix it so that we can put the state on a stronger, more sustainable financial path and then devote resources to all those areas of public investment currently compromised and threatened by this looming crisis.

Related post:

• Educator groups offer pension reform alternatives. Is a sensible common ground now possible?

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

What if everything you knew about education was wrong?

Near the beginning of his book, David Didau says he doesn’t actually want to convince you that everything you know about education is wrong (though a fair amount of it actually is), but rather “that you will consider the implications of being wrong and consider what you would do differently if your most cherished beliefs about education turned out not to be true.” He spends a good portion of the book exploring why we have a tendency to stubbornly believe what we do, but then he explodes some of the most commonly-held beliefs in P-12 education.

Didau, who is from England, is a former teacher and a devotee of education psychology. As formative assessment guru Dylan Wiliam notes in his introduction to Didau’s 2015 book, What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?, the practice of education in recent years seems remarkably disconnected from what research actually reveals about the way we learn. Didau uses that research to challenge a host of ideas about instruction and assessment and offers a robust defense for a rather traditional approach to learning: knowledgeable teachers carefully modeling and guiding students through supported practice, revisiting challenging, domain-specific concepts until students have become experts in their own right.

According to Didau, if there’s one overarching misconception about education, it’s that we can observe short-term, incremental learning in students. “We teach, children learn,” Didau says of our false assumptions. “That’s the input/output myth.” Research on learning reveals that the process is far more complicated, Didau argues. In our obsession with short-term learning gains, we mistake “performance” - the ability to mimic a skill or concept - for real learning. Information can be forced into short-term memory over brief periods of time, but it doesn’t last. Thus the experience of every teacher: today students seem to understand the lesson, but tomorrow they’ll be as clueless as if I had never taught it at all.

Didau shows how forgetting is actually an essential part of learning. Unless a learning experience is imbued with a very high degree of emotional content or connection, new information usually has to be taught - and forgotten - several times for it to become embedded in long-term memory. Real learning takes place when new knowledge becomes linked to an existing schema - a mental framework of understand a complex web of information - or when schema are completely rearranged into new patterns to incorporate added content.

The implications of this understanding of learning are considerable. Didau is critical of many current practices of formative assessment, which seek to determine whether students have attained short-term mastery of a concept. Relying on students correctly answering formative assessment questions or tasks can be misleading, especially if the teacher assumes these correct answers means she can “move on” and be done with the concept. “If they answer your questions correctly, it means very little,” Didau says. “Who cares what they know at the end of the lesson. Better to assume that they are likely to forget it.”

Didau advocates a practice he calls “interleaving,” or intentionally reteaching key concepts while increasing the amount of time after each lesson. Not every concept or skill would need to be addressed through interleaving, but only those he calls threshold concepts, or those key understandings that students often struggle to master and upon which further progress in that subject depends. For example, Didau suggests gravity in physics, evolutionary theory in biology, opportunity cost in economics, and deconstruction in literature as possible threshold concepts for each discipline. Each subject might have several more threshold concepts depending on the grade level or developmental level of the students.

That these concepts are difficult to master explains why they are linchpins to deeper learning. The key goal of lesson planning should be to make sure every student is engaged in productive struggle with new material, because that’s where maximum learning takes place. Teachers should be assisting students in moving from a novice to an expert level (as developmentally appropriate) relative to their subjects.

While all of the above may sound like common sense, much of educational practice in recent decades stands in the way of the kind of rich, content-specific, and teacher-led instruction Didau is advocating. In fact, Didau positions the teacher as essential player in the learning process (very much the “sage on the stage” and not merely the “guide on the side”). In contrast to teaching approaches that place a major emphasis on student agency, collaborative learning, and “real-world relevancy” (whatever that means), Didau argues for a traditional model of instruction whereby the teacher as content-area expert explains new material, models new skill and application of knowledge, and carefully directs students through scaffolded levels of practice until independence is achieved.

Didau doesn’t necessarily reject project-based learning, group work, or “21st century skills” as wastes of time, but argues that spending energy on these strategies is far less effective and efficient than teacher-led instruction. Lest the reader think Didau’s methods would lead to rote memorization of facts, he presents a powerful argument that embedding new knowledge into students long-term memory is inseparable from teaching them how to think critically and creatively. “Creativity requires form,” he argues, illustrating how masterful artists spend years learning techniques and styles so that they can actually deviate from them.

As an advocate for formative assessment strategies, I found What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? compelling on multiple levels. Didau offers several pages of his book to formative assessment expert Dylan Wiliam, who agrees with Didau that there are many ways of oversimplifying and misusing formative assessment while still making a strong case that, whatever its limitations, teachers and students benefit from having more data about their learning progress than less.

Didau does not argue against assessment, but shifts the emphasis in how assessment is used. Specifically, he argues that regular testing of previously-taught material is itself one of the most powerful means of helping students relearn and therefore master new knowledge. So he advocates for less re-teaching and lots more retesting of previously-taught material.

Related to this, I found Didau’s ideas challenging to my keen interest in helping teachers create more personalized learning environments. I’ve recently become concerned about some of the excesses in the personalized learning movement that have de-emphasized the important role of knowledge in favor of teaching generic skills (as if those could be separated from domain-specific content), but still feel that instruction needs to be far more directed to individual students’ readiness levels relative to a clear and rigorous curriculum. But if Didau is correct, it’s far more difficult to actually establish a child’s readiness level that I assumed, and students may actually benefit greatly from being regularly reintroduced to content they or their teacher think they have already mastered.

Perhaps there is more room here for whole class instruction than I’ve previously considered, and perhaps the key really is ensuring that no matter how many times a student has encountered a concept, the learning must be deliberately difficult enough to cause the student to struggle, but always with the actual possibility of supported success.

I believe all teachers and school administrators would benefit from reading What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? and struggling with the questions David Didau raises. Alongside recent works by E. D. Hirsch (reviewed here) and Daisy Christodoulou (reviewed here), Didau’s book makes a strong case for a rigorous and well-planned curriculum and thoughtful teacher-led classrooms.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• Seven Myths About Education
• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a content-rich curriculum
• If caring is king, content is queen.
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution.